Would you recommend being a type designer?

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Comments

  • Raphaël Ronot
    Raphaël Ronot Posts: 35

    I am far from making a living out of type (not even sure that day will come) but I still recommend that you try to learn type design.

    Reason is: even if you “fail” to become a full-time, cash-flow-positive type designer, you will be a much better design professional thanks to type.

    Type design will require you to…

    • Train your eyes to really see shapes
    • Obsess over details few people care about
    • Develop a strong culture of design history
    • Think in consistent systems
    • Find ways to automate your workflow
    • Learn a bit of code
    • Rework, rework, rework

    If not through royalties, these things will pay off eventually. And you might have found a fulfilling hobby along the way.

    Regarding education: I don't think that a design degree is needed to become a type designer. YES, some diplomas will give you an unfair advantage over the "competition", especially at the beginning of your career. But there are other ways to get there.

    If you're looking for a solid introduction to the craft, maybe consider a summer program like Type@Paris for example? 

    Best of luck :)

  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 846
    Typofactory said:
    … would you recommend it to anyone who seems to like it? …

    Find out if your soul burns for good typography, first. Then come back and ask that question again.

  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,589
    edited August 2023
    I began focusing on type in 2004, when I was an undergraduate in a prestigious Graphic Design undergraduate course in London. Like many others who have posted here, I went on to do a postgraduate course specifically in typeface design.

    I did eventually graduate, but I had (due only to my own faults) a rough time with it, and up until the last term it wasn't clear to me or anyone else, I think, that I would actually hand in sufficient work to pass the class. But I did learn, during that time, what "an education" was really about, and where I had some gaps, which I went on to try to fill by myself.

    In these last 20 years, I've met, and even worked directly with, people up and down the industry - from those in the USA who started in the 70s as full time type designers and haven't stopped, to those born and raised in peripheral nations in this century who are just getting started; from those at the largest international type firms, to those proudly independent.

    Overall, I think those who succeed at making a life from type, are generally easy to describe as "an educated person."  That is to say, they had an excellent secondary education, like at the high school level. What they studied before type design at a tertiary level (be that at a college/university undergraduate course, or by self-study into a specific subject) is not so relevant. While a college degree in Graphic Design tends to be the most common, I think this tends to mask a prior strong secondary education in those that succeed. It is correlation, not causation.

    It is common around the world that students aged 16 to 18 that are recognized by their schoolteachers as academically advanced are offered college level classes within the high school setting. So, I think a world-class, truly elite-level, secondary education, is much more broadly interdisciplinary than any Graphic Design degree, and covers many subjects: It will cover the artistic, technological, linguistic, business, historical, cultural, rhetorical, logical, requirements so sufficiently as to then go on to be a formidable type designer.

    I don't think a Graphic Design degree (or any degree, really) will provide such a base; the point of tertiary education is already too late for that. And where colleges provide "introduction to" classes, they are at best equal to those at the top high school level – and I've seen such classes that were not.

    Where I've seen people struggle to cement a career in type, I would generalize that it is because they lack one or more foundational pieces of a strong secondary education, and  formed a self-image that is self-limiting such that they are unable to fill that gap by themselves. "I am not a programmer" is a self fulfilling prophecy. Yet no child who was taught programming in junior high school could think this, and you can be sure that children attending elite private boarding schools like Deerfield have access to a makerspace on-site. 

    So, these folks get frustrated, and turn to another career path. And that gap is there because they are coming from what is objectively not the upper social class - which is to say, a typical middle class, with a typical secondary education - which most people would say is just fine. Put a different way, if a "good" school isn't an elite school, it isn't good enough. Good schools teach young people just enough to be good employees. 

    What is an educated person? I came across this screed on it the other day:

    Twelve Reflections on an Educated Person, by John Taylor Gatto

    An educated person writes his own script through life; he is not a character in a government or corporation play, nor does he mouth the words of any intellectual's utopian fantasy. Education and intelligence are not the same things. The educated person is self-determined to a large degree.

    Time doesn't hang heavily on an educated person's hands. She can be alone. She is seldom at a loss for what to do with time.

    An educated person possesses a blueprint of personal value, a unique philosophy which tends toward the absolute. It is not plastically relative altering to suit present company or circumstances. Because of this absolute aspect, an educated person knows at all times who he is, what he will tolerate, where to find peace. But at the same time, an educated person is aware of and respects community values, and even values strange to his experience.

    As Jefferson said, an educated person knows her rights and knows how to defend those rights.

    As Jefferson said, an educated person knows the ways of the human heart so well he's tough to cheat or fool. 

    As Jefferson said, an educated person possesses useful knowledge. She can ride, hunt, sail a boat (and build one), build a house, grow food, etc.

    An educated person understands the dynamics of relationships, partially from being well-read in great literature; as a consequence, he can form healthy relationships wherever he is.

    An educated person understands and accepts her own mortality; she understands that without death and ageing, nothing would have any meaning. An educated person learns from all her ages, even from the last hours of her life. 

    An educated person can discover truth for himself; he has intense awareness of the profound significance of being (as distinguished from doing), and the utter importance of being here and now.

    An educated person can figure out how to be useful. 

    An educated person has the capacity to create: New things, new experiences, new ideas.

    Education is built around ten cores: the metaphysical reality, the historical reality, the personal reality, the physical world within reach, the physical world outside personal awareness, the possibilities of association, an understanding of vocation, home-making, the challenges of adulthood met, the challenges of loss, ageing and death met.

    If you become such a person, becoming a type designer is not so hard.
  • Paul Hanslow
    Paul Hanslow Posts: 196
    Nicely written, Dave. 

    Personally, I believe my high school education was lacklustre and I've fought tooth and nail to relocate myself (geographically and educationally) from where I was schooled. 

    I'd be interested to hear the differences in 'struggles' between type designers who began 20 years ago vs those who entering the industry today. 
  • Diego Aravena
    Diego Aravena Posts: 10
    I can relate to so many posts in this forum now. Personally, I think it's a good idea to start with something in high demand, such as UX or programming, and then explore the possibility of transitioning into typeface design. I completed a Reading program two years ago, and it was quite realistic; many of us were concerned about finding a type-related job in the future. Perhaps the landscape has changed compared to 20 years ago. So, my advice is that if you want to pursue your passion, be realistic. Sometimes it's about being in the right place at the right time with the right skills. If luck doesn't favor you in the type design field, consider pursuing in-demand jobs, especially in tech, and see if you can eventually become known as the 'type expert.' Good luck!
  • DiegoSouza
    DiegoSouza Posts: 60
    @Dave Crossland that's a comment about your last post. 

    Well certainly i'm not the most qualified person to say a lot of things about life or  eighter about education, but your comment certainly got my attention. 

    I never heard any mention to type design during my years in high school, at some point i even had a certain bias towards those people that were ""graphic designers"", that in my head were lazy people that use to make poor jobs in photoshop stretching images of low resulution and literally flooding the streets and the walls with propaganda of useless products... 

    But at the same time i always use to watch documentaries, tv shows about history and arts even brazil's goverment propraganda that during 2010's had a strong artistical weight speacially those ones directed to the erradication of poverty and hunger, i always thouht they were beatiful some how, they could inspire emotion, but i had no ideia which type of person/professional produced that type of content but in my mind certanly wasn't the lazy "graphic designers" that i mentioned. 

    time has passed since and i found my pockets empty, at the same period i got to the realization of what was the job market and how school were just a bigger plan of some farmers feeding the cows ( not trying to get in politics but personally i'm not an advocate for communism at all but certainly capitalism has it flaws) since finishing high school i got a hard time trying to find a job, i have a questioning personality and as always i make questions that people aren't happy to answer specially in corporate world, i like to learn i like to exhange ideias and knowledge but i have no respect to an imposed hierachy or invisible limits that i should or shouldn't talk. 

    Since i got into programming and found out that i hated it, such an austeric environament... and then i found some people talking about ui/ux design i bought some books and slowly and was learning about graphic design, and after some books i found out that the people that make beautiful fonts, posters, disc covers, books, signage were those so called graphic/type designers at first i questioned but how... well i got the answer with one of the first modernist graphic designers in brazil, well we have two types of aplied visual arts, the commercial artists and the graphic designers and besides both learning the same concepts both produce different outcomes with the first being a really poor in moral and professional values and literally someone sold out, since i found the manifest "first things first" i found myself, i found a new north a north that was what i wanted to be, finally, a graphic designer with a plus i wanted to do the fonts that since i was a kid i always percieved some being nicer than others, now being a apprendice of type design and a former graphic designer that wants to persue a second degree in architecture, how financially is going to happen idk. 

    But all this commentary to say that type design is a big rabbit hole by itself, with few resources compared to other areas online, and anyone that tries to persue a carrer on the matter is most likely an outsider to a bigger or less degree and your comment is a concrete realisation of what any outsider probably already realised. 

    im not trying to say too much, just things that came in my mind, at the end of the day it might not even make sense to you or anyone reading this. 

    sorry for the possible typos and for anyone interested in a great documentary that's a great recommendation and please pay attention to how the graphic designer made such a amazing abstract representation of niemier organic curves and how niemier presents his architecture and oposes his ideas to his master LeCorbusier.

    Youtube subtitles are working.

    Oscar Niemeyer: A Vida é um Sopro ( Completo) /Life is a Breath (Full )/english subtitles - YouTube

    Have a great day! 

  • Grant Bowers
    Grant Bowers Posts: 7
    Hello all, it has been a while, and I’m hungry for more.

    A lot has changed in the three years since I asked the titular question: whether y’all would recommend being a type designer. Naturally, the type design forum responded very positively (which I thank you all so much for; everyone makes this field so great to get to be a part of). Additionally, you all gave a lot of practical advice for anyone who wishes to make a career out of type design.

    As for myself, I've been learning and doing more type design. I went to the TDC awards over the summer and saw some really cool contemporary type design in person. I've designed a few fonts as "practice" you could say, but now I've solidified a few directions into fonts I am designing for eventual release. I've taken a class in graphic design outside of school and am presently taking and enjoying a workshop on type design. Lately, I've been thinking more about the type design beyond the Latin script and how to make a font "better."
    Nick Shinn said:
    However, the real question is: are you fascinated by the shape of letters, by typography, by the phenomenon of reading text? 
    Andreas Stötzner said:

    Find out if your soul burns for good typography, first. Then come back and ask that question again.

    Paul Hanslow said:
    The first thing I'd ask myself if I was to considering becoming a type designer is., 'does the job fit my temperament' or more specifically, ' can I work as a type designer and be satisfied with all that this career choice entails?'. 
    I can confidently say that I want to design type; I feel a calling for it, and I can't really imagine spending my days doing anything else. Like Mr. Sowersby, Larabie, Ronot, and many others said, there is just so much depth to the field that approaching it from almost any perspective is sure to reveal a previously unseen side of it. 

    I've talked to a few type designers and teachers since posting this, and many of them have suggested that learning graphic design is very important in designing type: how are you going to make something useful if you don't know how it is going to be used? I'll admit that I'm not the best graphic designer, but I do want to understand what level that "foundational knowledge of graphic design and typography" is.

    John Hudson said:
    If someone is serious about entering the type design field, my advice would be to learn technical and production skills to complement their design skills. Despite the efforts of some font tool makers to try to make type design and font creation easy, fonts remain complex technical products, and the people who have a solid understanding of the OpenType font format, who know how to work with more than one tool, and who have some programming understanding (not necessarily actual coding skills, although that is also a specific benefit) will find more diverse ways to earn money.
    I am super interested in font engineering and the internals of how fonts work, especially as it relates to more global and underserved scripts. My question here is how best to learn this: there is much less information about font engineering than type design, and a lot of the things I've learned (the internals of font formats, interpolation, hinting) are very well documented but also have had a lot of work put into them to make them work very well, whereas the things that seem "unsolved" (representing complex scripts digitally, mostly) seem like the work of domain experts and not fledgling designers. Additionally, it seems like it takes a long time to build a connection to a script that one was not raised in. How do I make sure that my fonts for a script I cannot read are still useful and readable to someone who can? How can I best get feedback from native readers/designers? Any insight into these would be very helpful.

    Thierry Blancpain said:
    I’d caution that this forum is not a representative slice of the type design industry.

    If you are only interested in type design and none of the other aspects of running a foundry, don’t try to run a foundry. I expect the results to be similar to people replying here who release type on their own, but don’t want to actively run a foundry. Running a foundry would include marketing, business, and usually also customer support activities as everyday tasks.

    John Hudson said:
    I have made a living as a type designer for almost 30 years, and it has never been exactly easy, but that is in part because I only set out of make a living and to spend most of my time designing type. My contemporaries who did really well financially out of type design are the ones who spent their time growing a business beyond the scale of one or two individual designers, in which case the work of running the business tends to overtake the work of designing.

    As someone who is running a foundry while also designing a little bit of type, but is nowhere near a full-time type designer: if you want to run a foundry, run a foundry! It’s a lot of fun and I find it really rewarding. Being able to provide a platform for other designers, and promoting their work, is something that I care about and that is really fun for me. If you don’t want to do all the things involved in that, find your niche in type design and if you’re decent at what you do, you’ll most likely be able to earn a living.

    This can for example mean that you release type through one or more foundries who engage in these above activities, or that you become a technical specialist, or that you freelance for other designers and take over production work, mastering, or other such activities for their releases. 

    But if you do want to take an educational path to type design, you’ll study graphic design first, anyway. And you have a great head start if you try to design typefaces at your age already. If that’s something you want to do right now, do it! No need to consider your entire career when picking hobbies as a teenager, though.
    Mr. Blancpain: in your description of running a foundry, it seems like a vertically structured organization: a way for other type designers to move their work up through the industry into a more visible or wide-reaching platform. I would like to run a foundry as a more lateral thing: a way for me to issue my work on my own terms and as a way to collaborate with other individuals/groups. I wouldn't want my type foundry responsible for someone else's work and I wouldn't want someone else responsible for my work. Are personal type foundries which offer the designs of one or two designers viable businesses? Many of those do exist, but it seems that with time they grow into businesses which employ others and become less and less the work of one designer-owner. Additionally, I see that running a type foundry takes time away from the drawing of type. How much time is it? One more thing: is there anything that one person cannot do on their own? That is, are there more fundamental concerns to going it alone?


    In any case, I still have time until college and I always enjoy hearing the opinions of those with more experience than me. The path to and through type design, the day-to-day work it takes, and any other observations, opinions, or criticisms of the industry, its future, and it's most pressings problems/opportunities are all extremely valuable information not just to me, but to all the other aspiring type designers now and in the future. 

    Thank you all
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 135
    As a font engineer also very interested in font technology and type design beyond Latin, I can maybe share how I got into and how I would thus recommend to approach it (although there are others in this thread, notably John, with much more experience in and commitment to exactly this field):
    - study type design to a reasonable degree, this often entails a master's. They typically require a graphic design bachelor's, or equivalent experience in type (which is hard to get otherwise). If you are interested in anything beyond Latin, go to Reading.
    - get into font production. Read documentation. Disassemble fonts. Learn Python, at the very least. Ask questions on forums and maybe answer some too. Engage with like-minded people, like here.
    - I personally went on to study linguistics, which helps tremendously when wanting to understand how type can serve language communities. I think this is a vital part when designing type for other scripts (even for Latin).

    If you're worried about financials: definitely learn your bit of font engineering. It will help you a lot, and will make you able to help others a lot.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,535
    Type design is there for you if you are there for it. Few become wealthy by it financially if that is what matters to you. 
  • Grant Bowers
    Grant Bowers Posts: 7
    SCarewe said:
    - get into font production. Read documentation. Disassemble fonts. Learn Python, at the very least. Ask questions on forums and maybe answer some too. Engage with like-minded people, like here.
    - I personally went on to study linguistics, which helps tremendously when wanting to understand how type can serve language communities. I think this is a vital part when designing type for other scripts (even for Latin).
    Do you find that your study of linguistics directly applies to type or is it more of an additional perspective which has shaped your view of it? Additionally, do you think that studying other, less directly pertinent subjects (something like architecture or even music) could benefit oneself? I guess my question is really: what is the balance between type design/font engineering and learning about type design/font engineering?

    @Chris Lozos That is really encouraging! I do have another question for you, though: what do you mean by “being there for it”? Dedication? Practice? Engagement?

    Marc Foley said:
    A lot has changed since the first post in 2023. The release of Claude Opus 4.5 at the end of 2025 was a turning point when imo LLMs became commercially usable. The progress in the last year since then has been staggering and they're only going to get better.
    I've been in the game for the past 15 years, solely making a living from the font industry by understanding deep font internals, build tooling and contributing code to build and test tooling. My day job now looks very different when compared to previous years. The knowledge I accumulated over those years is now largely present in these LLM models. I can just prompt "Please fix this font family so it is releasable on Google Fonts/MyFonts". It'll then go and download all the required tooling, reads the docs, fix the fonts and then report what I manually need to fix such as glyph outlines etc. My only real moat left and this probably applies to graphic designers and programmers is having some experience to know what is right or wrong. As the models get better this will diminish further. 
    Back to the main question. No, I wouldn't recommend this field post 2025, before I would've. I would choose a field that has a higher barrier to entry, requires certification and isn't 100% computer based. However, my wife is a lawyer and her company is also doing layoffs (mainly junior and admin staff) and adopting llms so I think these changes are happening to all industries.
    Do you think this is true for all scripts? It is my understanding that LLMs have somewhat of an English bias, and there is (from what I’ve seen) a dearth of information on exactly how fonts and shaping engines should approach layout and shaping for complex scripts. Do you think that this too will fall to LLMs, leaving little to no work for the font designer/engineer?
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 135
    Grant Bowers said:

    Do you think that studying other, less directly pertinent subjects (something like architecture or even music) could benefit oneself?
    Funnily enough, I also studied music for two years (classical/jazz music production/engineering, "Tonmeister"), but I wouldn't know whether this has directly informed my practice. It's more a result of just being curious about everything. That's the core of it: as long as you're constantly curious, you'll always find something to do. That of course not only applies to type design.

    My linguistics studies are more of a complement, in that I feel I have a much more holistic grasp of what I'm doing. Understanding how a language works for which you're learning a script is vital, since there are many more ways than just linear alphabetical encoding. If this is a field you're interested in (the intersection of type design and languages), at the very least get a basic education in linguistics in your free time. Personally, I'm just doing the degree because the courses are really fun and interesting, not for the degree itself. It does help, however, because it forces you to do all related fields, not just focus on the one(s) that interest you most. Again, a broad education is vital.

    Probably more general advice than just pertaining to type design, but if you can make it work, study for as long as you can, it's the best thing in the world. I'm in my 10th year of studies, personally, and don't see this changing :) You will always find unique ways of connecting dots you wouldn't have thought to connect previously. Most of all, you'll be in a more unique position the further you specialise (be it in the same or in different things).
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,892
    edited November 4
    I sort of stumbled into the work, at a time and place where there weren’t formal educational opportunities in type design. I learned mostly by doing. My parents were in art and design education — but neither in typographic or graphic design —, so I grew up absorbing a feeling for space and proportion, and was encouraged to look at things closely. I read Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and Walter Tracy’s Letters of Credit, which both came out around that time in the early 1990s, and then older books like Updike’s Printing Types. Bringhurst’s art-historical taxonomy of typefaces put type into a context that made sense to me, and then Gerritt Noordzij’s ATypI Letterletter and his book The Stroke provided a framework to understand what the heck I was doing.
    Regarding designing for different scripts, I proceed from the understanding that writing systems are systems, and can be understood as such. They are multifaceted and complex systems, not just graphical and structural, but also historical and cultural, so the more ways in which you can understand them the better. So being able to read one or more languages is to understand the system in a particular way, which will inform design in that way, while other ways of understanding them involve different approaches.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,535
    @Chris Lozos That is really encouraging! I do have another question for you, though: what do you mean by “being there for it”? Dedication? Practice? Engagement?

    Yes, that but what I would add is that the process of designing type should be something you look forward to doing just for the sake of it—just for the feeling you get from doing it. It should be fulfilling unto itself. You should be able to get lost in it and wonder how all that time flew by. If you can't, you are in the wrong place.
  • Grant Bowers
    Grant Bowers Posts: 7
    @SCarewe That is super interesting (I’d never heard of a Tonmeister before), thank you!

    John Hudson said:
    Regarding designing for different scripts, I proceed from the understanding that writing systems are systems, and can be understood as such. They are multifaceted and complex systems, not just graphical and structural, but also historical and cultural, so the more ways in which you can understand them the better. So being able to read one or more languages is to understand the system in a particular way, which will inform design in that way, while other ways of understanding them involve different approaches.
    A clarifying question: do you think that the script is one system with many aspects to it or is what is called a script is a unifying name for a lot of different yet related systems? That is, is a script a thing or a collection of things. Furthermore, do you think that considering all the facets of these script-systems is helpful when designing a typeface, or, like when designing a font “for display and text,” it can simply muddy the water?

    @Chris Lozos Yes and I think that feeling of being lost in the details of a letter and then taking a step back and looking at the system as a whole, amazed, and the happiness derived from such a fulfilling task as type design is exactly why I ask these questions—I enjoy the task on its own, and yet I’d like to reach higher levels with my work; to do better in every way I can. I am very much in agreement with you, that one should enjoy their work in itself. I think I may have come off as too career-focused, too transactional; for that, I apologize. I mean that I don’t want to have to sideline type design for the sake of money, rather, I want type design to be the main work of my life. I really am passionate about it. Call it a job, career, vocation, craft, whatever—I just want to design type. It is my understanding that it is somewhat difficult to do so—that is, “make a living” designing type. That is what I meant by “encouraging”: it is glad news to me that I can get to spend my time designing type. I am sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. 
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,535
    You didn't give me that impression. I just didn't know how to read into what you said. No need to be sorry ;-)
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,892
    edited 2:33AM
    A clarifying question: do you think that the script is one system with many aspects to it or is what is called a script is a unifying name for a lot of different yet related systems?
    I think about the relationship of script and language system in terms of general and specific:
    A script is a collection of graphical elements with general rules about how they are laid out and combined.
    A writing system is an application of a script to a specific language. This includes the mapping of graphical elements to linguistic content (commonly phonemes or morphemes), possible localised variants of the graphical elements, and may also involve variations or exceptions to the general script rules.
    So script and language systems are both systems in the sense I was describing in the previous post, but you need to understand how the system of a script applies to the system of writing a specific language. [A lot of scripts are strongly associated with one language, and evolved their forms and layout rules in the context of that language, sometimes in ways that make them difficult to adapt to writing other languages. But then there are script like Latin that have evolved in the writing of a lot of different languages.]
    I think designing a typeface, even one for your native script and language, always involves choices about what aspects of your knowledge are relevant and how to apply them. The more understanding you have of the systems, the easier it is to determine what will be helpful for a given idea.

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